Influential books I've enjoyed

Chuck Doswell

Recently, an old friend e-mailed ... in the course of our "conversation" he suggested I put together a listing of the books that I felt were influential on me. This sounded like a fun thing to do. The current list will be updated as other influential books come to mind. I'm mostly not listing books that I've read recently ... these mostly go back a ways. Many of these are out of print and would only be available from a used book seller. Try amazon.com or Abe Books to track these down, if you're interested.

In no particular order, then, here goes:

• Volcanoes New and Old - Satis N. Coleman
• Spiders and Their Kin - Hebert W. Levi, Lorna R. Levi, and Herbert S. Zim
• War - Gwynne Dyer
• Tornadoes of the United States - Snowden D. Flora
• The Student as Nigger - Jerry Farber
• Severe Local Storms - David Atlas, Ed.
• Principles of Meteorological Analysis - Walter J. Saucier
• To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
• The Silent Spring - Rachel Carson
• The Lord of the Rings - J.R.R. Tolkien
• Civil War - Shelby Foote
• The Third Wave - Alvin Toffler
• Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance - Robert Pirsig
• Cosmos - Carl Sagan
• Several collections of essays - Stephen Jay Gould
• Science fiction by:
  • A.E. van Vogt (e.g., The World of )
  • Larry Niven (e.g., Ringworld, World of Ptavvs)
  • Arthur C. Clarke (e.g., The City and the Stars)
  • Isaac Asimov (e.g., the Foundation trilogy)
  • Frank Herbert (e.g., Dune, Hellstrom's Hive )
  • Robert Heinlein (e.g., Puppet Masters)
  • Alfred Bester (e.g., The Demolished Man)
  • George R. Stewart (e.g., Earth Abides)
  • Douglas Adams (e.g., The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy)
  • E.E. Smith (e.g., the Lensman series)
  • Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., (e.g., Cat's Cradle)
  • 1984 - George Orwell
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• The Feynman Lectures in Physics - Richard P. Feynman
• Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman - Richard P. Feynman
• In Search of Excellence - Thomas J. Peters and Robert H. Waterman, Jr.
• Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid - Douglas R. Hofstadter
• Mountain Light - Galen Rowell
• The Devil's Dictionary - Ambrose Bierce
• Catch-22 - Joseph Heller
• Prairy Erth - William Least Heat-Moon
• The World As I See It / Out of My Later Years - Albert Einstein
• Cadillac Desert - Marc Reisner
• Desert Solitaire - Edward Abbey
• In Wildness Is the Preservation of the World - Eliot Porter
• Not Man Apart - Robinson Jeffers/various photographers
• Gentle Wilderness - John Muir/Richard Kauffman
• Walden - Henry David Thoreau
• The Fractal Geometry of Nature - Benoit Mandelbrot
• At Dawn We Slept - Gordon W. Prange
• Rising Tide - John M. Barry
• Bambi - Felix Salten
• The Gulag Archipelago trilogy - Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
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